Keep Digging the Hole

Last week in TIME Magazine, Maia Szalavitz wrote about Glenn Greenwald’s report on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal. In the article, she quotes one person skeptical of whether that success can be brought here to the states:

“I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn’t having much influence on our drug consumption,” says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

Mark Kleinman emailed me once about something I wrote and had a major outburst, expressing all sorts of hostility – I’m not saying that motivated him to dismiss the relevance of Portugal, but I am going tow rite and demand specifics.

I find it so shallow and vapid when people say: “We can’t look to what happened in that country because there are cultural differences and size differences” without being specific — why would drug decriminalization work with a population of 10 million people but not 300 million? What, specifically, are the meaningful “cultural differences” between Portugal and the U.S. that allows decriminalization to work in the former but not the latter?

In fairness to Kleiman, he was quoted in that article and thus not necessarily able to control what was conveyed, but I am going to demand some specifics from him.

After reading that, I was reminded of an exchange that Kleiman had with several commenters at his site a while back over the same subject. In the comments of this post, a commenter wrote:

Mark, you’ve claimed a few times that European and Canadian successes at various forms of drug “reform” can’t be used as examples for the US, because social conditions are different here. (If I’ve mischaracterized you here, please correct me.)

I’d like to know just what social features of Europe and Canada you believe to be responsible for the success of these programs there, and how you would expect similar programs to fail in the US due to different conditions here.

Kleiman responded with a list of 14 items (his comments don’t have numbers or links, but it was posted at June 21, 2006 04:29 AM, about 1/2 way down the thread). Later on the thread, I picked apart a few of the items. Looking back at the list again and using Portugal as a comparison point, it’s even easier to see that a number of the items are irrelevant (1, 4) or untrue – either outright or as a difference (2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13). But what’s even more amusing about that list is that almost all of the reasons that he gives (2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14) are things that are either caused – or greatly exacerbated – by drug prohibition itself. That’s like saying “oh my, our eagerness to wage war and torture people has made the rest of the world really mad at us. I guess we have no choice now but to keep waging more wars and torturing people”. Or to borrow a modern overused office expression – “the beatings will continue until morale improves”.

Of course, when Kleiman wrote that comment, he was addressing cases like Zurich, Amsterdam, and Vancouver, which may have fit his list a little better, but now that he’s thrown out the same exact argument to Greenwald because “Portugal is smaller than the U.S.” and has vague “cultural differences,” it certainly seems like this is a case where the conclusion stays the same while the justifications keep changing.

I’m not going to jump to any conclusions here about Kleiman’s motivations. A lot of people in the drug law reform community scratch their heads as to why Kleiman sometimes makes very eloquent analyses on the failures of drug policy, but then will turn around and lash out at people who simply follow that path to its logical conclusions. Either way, I’m looking forward to Kleiman’s response to Greenwald, but not holding my breath.

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Is there a third alternative to our current dysfunctional law and legalization?

Friends of ours were convicted of running a pot growing farmlet (in their basement). Their “punishment” really amazed me. The court went to great lengths to create an imprisonment schedule that allowed one or the other parent to keep the family’s (non drug) business going and raise their kids.

What did this accomplish? Two decent folks were punished mildly for violating a taboo, likely their businees is now handled by some scuz.

It seems to me that there is a large list of “crimes” where we have no sensible “punishment.”

Martha Stewart emerge from brief detainment wealthy and, in her case, with great publicity.

Prostitution: A night in jail does what?

Who has been punished for ordering Abu Gahreib? How much money has Ollie North made BECAUSE if his conviction?

The punishment for the Watergate affair was ?

Why not impose labelling on offenders? Imagine bigamists sentenced by having a scarlet letter B on their foreheads and ID cards? Politicians who take bribes would be sentenced by the scarlet P. Martha would get to wear a dollar sign between her brows. Colson would get the ignoble five pointed star with a line through it. Antisemites get to sport the scarlet mogen david, etc.

The presence of a new minority, the labeled, would force society to define WHY we are punishing people rather than figure out the cheapest way to put Martha Stewart up in a hotel for a few months. I sduspect she would rather spend time in McNeil Island then wear the sacrletyt dollar for ten years.

Labelling has one additional benefit, those who agree with the convicted, could voluntarily assume the label! I wonder how many MJ users or just supporters of legalization, would adopt the Marijuana Tattoo as a form of protest?

Every time I’ve ever heard an otherwise sensible person dismiss European or Canadian policies, especially social welfare, as impractical in the U.S. because of “cultural differences,” it has been pretty clear to me that what they meant (but most would never admit, of course) is that those other countries don’t have a large underclass of stupid, lazy black people. Kleiman will most likely never be able to offer a coherent explanation of what he means, because to do so he would have to admit that he doesn’t think that the African American underclass have the moral fiber to resist drug consumption.

@2 Mike, I’ve long been willing to give Kleiman the benefit of the doubt on that front, but you’re right, arguments like those have long been used by people who believe that we have to do thinks differently with drug policy because of our African-American population. It’s why we got the idiotic crack-powder sentencing disparities in the first place.

Every time I’ve ever heard an otherwise sensible person dismiss European or Canadian policies…is that those other countries don’t have a large underclass of stupid, lazy black people.

The origins of the DrugWar are based in racial bigotry. The drug laws are rife with it. For a long time, you can’t sell ‘firewater’ to ‘Injuns’ as they were thought by the dominant White society to become dangerously unstable. You couldn’t allow Blacks to take cocaine lest they become crazed rapists of White women and in their hysterical strength cannot be brought down with .32 caliber bullets. ‘Mexicans’ were thought to transform into machete-wielding dervishes after a few puffs of ‘marijuana’. And ‘everybody knew’ the ‘Yellow Peril’ was out to debauch the Great White Race via opium dens and take over the world; Sax Rohmer told us so!.

Such were the common perceptions at the time the first Federal drug laws were crafted nearly a century ago. Not a shred of scientific data involved, just this lunacy. A lunacy that has led to idiotic laws that have destroyed vastly more lives than the drugs ever could.

You don’t have to take my word for it; Professor Charles Whitebread, Professor of Law, USC Law School spelled it all out in his 1995 Address to the California Judges Association annual conference.

Jim Crow is alive and well and living in every Federal, State and local law book regarding illegal drugs. The racial composition of the prison population alone is enough of a clue. The Civil Rights Movement is effectively nullified when those it was meant to help are still abjured from participating in democracy when they have their right to vote voided courtesy of a felony drug offense conviction.

Now, today,which political party stands to gain from maintaining such laws on the books? And which one suffers from loss of effective numbers of those who would be its’ natural allies?

And which political party has regularly taken the pistols from the hands of its’ opponents and obligingly shot its’ own feet with them when it comes to trying to look ‘tough on drugs’ in a game of one-upmanship with those same political opponents?

Don’t bother calling to Houston for help from rocket scientists; this one should be real easy, and if it isn’t, you belong in a ‘home’.

Unfortunately, using that criteria, that’s exactly where most Democratic Party legislators belong for having voted as they have in support of the War on (Some) Drugs.

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